Well, we had our meeting yesterday by Zoom, spanning Nova Scotia, Alabama, Glasgow, Inverbervie and Aberdeen. As always it was fun, stimulating, satisfying and a great exchange between friends who have known each other since….well I met Jack in 1971! All of us on the group have been friends for over 30 years, and some of us even longer with one or two. So the book we choose (which we take it in turns to do) is only one part of the conversation. But here are a few comments which I noted, and which can double as a positive and appreciative view of Tom Greggs' recent book, The Breadth of Salvation, (Baker, 2020) All of us were positive about this slim but substantial book.
Full disclaimer, Tom Greggs is a colleague here in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, and a personal friend. Unlike many other disclaimers, I confess that knowing him means I hear his voice in much of the writing, and I happen to be sympathetic to the major theological emphases of this book. Even the title raises an important affirmation about the scope, scale and eternal intentions of God's salvific purposes in the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit in creation, redemption and reconciliation.
It's a book that is generous, ecclesial and corrective, by which I also mean it eschews narrowness, individualism and exclusion. A review of the various 'models' of atonement shows the diversity and contextual origins of several theories of the atonement. Gregg's Methodist convictions have their theological grounding in scriptural, patristic, reformation and evangelical expositions of the work of Christ. "The work of Christ is the work of the whole Godhead (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), who desires the salvation of the creation. Grace is the source of the salvation of humanity, and it is because God already loves humanity that Christ comes." (15)
There is a recurring theme of what I might call pneumatic ecclesiology. The new humanity in Christ is created by the Holy Spirit who draws all who have faith in the faithfulness of Christ into the community that is the Church, the embodiment of God's promised new creation, redemption and reconciliation. "The Spirit drenched community" consists of those who are being turned from the inward curve of self and sin, to the outward move to the other in self-giving and Christ-like love. Throughout, the emphasis on the Spirit, and the church in the power of the Spirit, is a welcome and well explored theme -deeply congenial to a group of Moltmann fans!
A long last chapter on repentance, which is a perceptive tour of the encounters with Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, shows that repentance is a multi-faceted experience of turning to Jesus and Jesus turning to the penitent. Our group warmed to this Jesus- centric view of God's compassion welcoming whoever came to Jesus, and for whatever reason. Salvation is broad enough, and the shoulders of Jesus broad enough, to carry all the mixed motives and confused searchings of all humanity – after all, they were broad enough to carry the cross.
The insistence throughout on the sociality of redemption, and the humanity of each believer being continuously restored in our relationship to the humanity of Jesus, shows Greggs' concern to insist on the real humanity of Christ, and the believer's incorporation into the Body of Christ as those being made more, not less human, through the work of the Spirit. There are echoes of Thomas and James Torrance's theology of the vicarious humanity of Christ in a number of key passages.
The use throughout of fresh metaphors, or biblical metaphors repristinated are helpful in rendering more established models of atonement, and therefore salvation, as less absolute and more mutually enriching.
One area we explored was whether the treatment of sin was too focused on the individual, and the need for forgiveness. This is not to say that the social, structural and human institutional expressions of self-interested power are ignored. But at times one feels that the wider vision of economic, political and racial justice, needed at least some further acknowledgement and comment. Part of this disquiet was because sin and its concomitant guilt and oppression means something very different to those whose living context is powerlessness, oppression and people broken by social forces and systems over which they have little control, and minimal choices.
For such people, guilt isn't the problem, bondage and oppression is. In which case liberation and restorative justice would more equate to salvation. It's not that such peoples do not need individual salvation; more that for the powerless deprived of justice it is the brokenness of the social systems and economies that require to be redeemed, and reconciliation to take place between the oppressor and the oppressed. That too is part of reach of the Cross, through which God has brought about the reconciliation of "all things."
But this is a theologically thought provoking and affirmative book, on that all seven of us agreed. Reading and discussing it we were happy to have our ideas refreshed on things we thought we knew, but now need to re-remember. The book deserves wide reading, perhaps especially as a refresher course for pastor-preachers; refreshing both the preacher's heart, and their intellectual grasp of the breadth of salvation, and the Gospel they are charged to preach.
Tomorrow I'll post some of the best quotations from my reading of the book.
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